The Patrician eBook

It was doubtful whether he would get to Ascot this
year. And his mind flew for a moment to his
promising two-year-old Casetta; then dashed almost
violently, as though in shame, to the Admiralty and
the doubt whether they were fully alive to possibilities.
He himself occupied a softer spot of Government,
one of those almost nominal offices necessary to qualify
into the Cabinet certain tried minds, for whom no more
strenuous post can for the moment be found. From
the Admiralty again his thoughts leaped to his mother-in-law.
Wonderful old woman! What a statesman she would
have made! Too reactionary! Deuce of a
straight line she had taken about Mrs. Lees Noel!
And with a connoisseur’s twinge of pleasure
he recollected that lady’s face and figure seen
that morning as he passed her cottage. Mysterious
or not, the woman was certainly attractive!
Very graceful head with its dark hair waved back from
the middle over either temple—­very charming
figure, no lumber of any sort! Bouquet about
her! Some story or other, no doubt—­no
affair of his! Always sorry for that sort of
woman!

A regiment of Territorials returning from a march
stayed the progress of his car. He leaned forward
watching them with much the same contained, shrewd,
critical look he would have bent on a pack of hounds.
All the mistiness and speculation in his mind was
gone now. Good stamp of man, would give a capital
account of themselves! Their faces, flushed by
a day in the open, were masked with passivity, or,
with a half-aggressive, half-jocular self-consciousness;
they were clearly not troubled by abstract doubts,
or any visions of the horrors of war.

Someone raised a cheer ‘for the Terriers!’
Lord Valleys saw round him a little sea of hats, rising
and falling, and heard a sound, rather shrill and
tentative, swell into hoarse, high clamour, and suddenly
die out. “Seem keen enough!” he thought.
“Very little does it! Plenty of fighting
spirit in the country.” And again a thrill
of pleasure shot through him.

Then, as the last soldier passed, his car slowly forged
its way through the straggling crowd, pressing on
behind the regiment—­men of all ages, youths,
a few women, young girls, who turned their eyes on
him with a negligent stare as if their lives were
too remote to permit them to take interest in this
passing man at ease.

CHAPTER IV

At Monkland, that same hour, in the little whitewashed
‘withdrawing-room’ of a thatched, whitewashed
cottage, two men sat talking, one on either side of
the hearth; and in a low chair between them a dark-eyed
woman leaned back, watching, the tips of her delicate
thin fingers pressed together, or held out transparent
towards the fire. A log, dropping now and then,
turned up its glowing underside; and the firelight
and the lamplight seemed so to have soaked into the
white walls that a wan warmth exuded. Silvery
dun moths, fluttering in from the dark garden, kept
vibrating, like spun shillings, over a jade-green bowl
of crimson roses; and there was a scent, as ever in
that old thatched cottage, of woodsmoke, flowers,
and sweetbriar.